A Century Later, She’s Still Red Hot

HAS any pop star had as many nicknames as Sophie Tucker? In a career that spanned seven decades, Tucker was variously billed as “The Empress of Songs,” “The Syncopated Cyclone” and “Our Lady Nicotine”; as “Iron Lungs,” “Muscle Dancer” and “Vaudeville’s Pet”; as “The Ginger Girl,” “The Grizzly Bear Girl” and “The Girl Who Never Disappoints.” During her early years as a vaudeville headliner, when rags were the rage, she was “The Tetrazzini of Ragtime.” When jazz took over, she became “The Queen of Jazzaration.”

in 1912, shortly after her last recordings for the Edison National Phonograph Company.

Even her “real” name was a nickname. Tucker, who came to the United States from Russia as an infant, was born Sonya Kalish and raised as Sonya Abuza. (The family name was changed during immigration to the United States.) She settled on the stage name Sophie Tucker after flirtations with various others, including Ethel Tucker and Sophia Taylor.

She was best known, though, by the tag line that stuck with her from her vaudeville heyday to her death in 1966 at 82: “The Last of the Red Hot Mamas.” In her final years Tucker was still being introduced by that title in nightclubs and on television, and still doing a version of her old routine: shout-singing songs full of double entendres while shaking a body nearly as broad as it was tall. It was a nostalgia act; Tucker’s circa-1910 brand of bawdiness was quaint by then.

But a new anthology of her earliest recordings shows that Tucker, at the peak of her stardom, was anything but old-fashioned. “Sophie Tucker: Origins of the Red Hot Mama, 1910-1922” (Archeophone) features Tucker’s first 24 recordings, digitally transferred from the original wax cylinders and 78 r.p.m. discs. (The CD package includes a 71-page booklet, with extensive liner notes by the filmmakers Susan and Lloyd Ecker, who are working on a Tucker documentary.) The record is stupendous fun: rags, blues and ballads, packed with jokes and innuendo, sung by Tucker in her patented swaggering, blaring style. And it’s an important historical document, which argues for a bigger place for Tucker in the popular-music canon  as a proto-feminist and taboo-shattering sensualist, and as a herald of pop musical modernity.

“This CD will remind people what an innovator Sophie Tucker was,” said Meagan Hennessey, an owner of Archeophone Records, a label devoted to early sound recordings. “She wasn’t just a kitschy old woman in big hats.”

To the extent that Tucker is remembered today, it is as that big-hatted, big-bellied oldie but-goody. She maintained a busy career into her late 70s, appearing on radio (and hosting her own broadcast, “Sophie Tucker and Her Show”), acting in movie musicals and continuing to make records well into the rock ’n’ roll era. But “Origins of the Red Hot Mama” takes listeners back to Tucker’s prime, reviving a voice heard by few people in the last eight decades.

The CD includes the 10 cylinder records Tucker cut for the Edison National Phonograph Company in 1910 and 1911. They are rare collectibles; in the 1960s Tucker confessed to fans that she didn’t own any of them. Archeophone (archeophone.com) spent seven years compiling the complete Tucker cylinders, drawing on private collections as well as the Edison National Historic Site archives and the recorded sound collection of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The rarity of the records is in part a result of Tucker’s powerhouse vocals, which nearly overwhelmed the capacities of the primitive wax cylinder medium. “She sings so loud, it was difficult to find cylinders in good enough shape, that have reasonable sound,” said Richard Martin, Ms. Hennessey’s husband and Archeophone’s co-owner.

The cylinders have been expertly digitized, but they are old, and they sound it, with decades’ worth of accumulated hiss and crackle. Yet in other respects Tucker’s turn-of-the-20th-century music sounds at home in the 21st.

The songs are awash in stories of lust and infidelity. In the jaunty ragtime number “That Lovin’ Soul Kiss” (1911) Tucker commands her beau to keep kissing her  although the “kiss” here sounds awfully euphemistic. “Sip the honey divine, for a long time,” she drawls. “One, two, and three/Now, longer/Four, five, and six/Still longer, honey/Seven, eight, nine/Oh, oh, babe.”

In “My Husband’s in the City” (1910), a reply to Irving Berlin’s 1909 hit “My Wife’s Gone to the Country (Hurrah! Hurrah!)” Tucker makes plain that she is having plenty of fun on her summer vacation while her husband minds the shop in town. “Knock Wood” (1911) is an opéra bouffe about hapless cuckolds and sexually ravenous women.

These songs are artifacts of a Progressive Era pop culture that waged a cheery revolt against Victorianism. At the front lines were vaudeville starlets like Tucker and the madcap Eva Tanguay, who flouted 19th-century ideals of demure femininity with suggestive song lyrics, ragtime rhythms and spectacular comical-carnal performance styles.

“Audiences in this period were emerging outside of the Victorian context of ‘true womanhood’ and domesticity,” said Eric Weisbard, an assistant professor of American studies at the University of Alabama who specializes in popular music. “These audiences were open to a different kind of presentation, to women singers who embodied a new kind of public sexuality and public pleasure.”

Tucker was in other ways an archetypal pop star of her day. She was a bootstrapping Jewish immigrant who cut her teeth singing for tips at her parents’ kosher restaurant in Hartford. In 1906 she moved to New York, where she rose through the saloon and variety theater circuit to earn roles in the Ziegfeld Follies and, eventually, marquee status in big-time vaudeville. Like her male counterpart, the cantor’s son turned pop star Al Jolson, she changed her name and graduated to all-American celebrity, but few could fail to detect the ethnic tinge in her singing, a link she made explicit with her huge schmaltz-swathed 1925 hit ballad, “My Yiddishe Mama.”

And then there was her girth. The first two decades of the century were a golden age of zaftig songstresses, and like other stars of the day  May Irwin, Stella Mayhew, Trixie Friganza  Tucker played her heft for ribald laughs. In “Won’t You Be a Dear, Dear Daddy to a ’Itta Bitta Doll,” the far-from-’itta-bitta Tucker promises (threatens?) to sit on her love object’s lap. “Everybody Shimmies Now,” which appears on “Origins of the Red Hot Mama” in a rambunctious 1919 recording, was a staple of Tucker’s live act for years, a showpiece for her ample assets. “Shimmy dancin’ can’t be beat,” she sings over honking brass and screeching strings. “You move everything except your feet.”

The bumptious, oversexed woman Tucker portrays in these songs has roots in the broad caricatures of blackface minstrelsy. Tucker knew that material well: she began her career as a “coon shouter,” slathering on burnt cork to sing songs full of watermelon chomping and other racist grotesqueries. The “Origins of the Red Hot Mama” CD package includes a rare photo from about 1907 of Tucker in blackface, on one bended knee, arms outstretched  a pose not unlike the one Jolson struck when performing his blackface anthem, “My Mammy.” Part of Tucker’s routine was a teasing racial reveal. As the Eckers write in the “Origins of the Red Hot Mama” liner notes, “She came up with the idea of removing her black wig and gloves while taking her bows, revealing her natural blond hair and white hands.”

Around 1909, Tucker stopped “blacking up” altogether, a decision she later depicted as a liberation. But traces of minstrelsy survived in her music. “Good Morning Judge” (1911), a burlesque about a kleptomaniac, finds Tucker exclaiming “lawd-a-mercy” in stereotypical dialect. In “Pick Me Up and Lay Me Down in Dear Old Dixieland” (1922), a plantation-nostalgia song in the Stephen Foster mold, Tucker croons, “Keep those darkies singing till I get back/To that ivy-covered ramshackle shack.”

But what is striking about Tucker’s vocals, even on her earliest cylinder recordings, is how she transmutes the rowdy comedy and raised decibels of the shouting tradition into a thrilling, idiosyncratic personal style. Her vocal tone is inimitable: husky, rumbling and very, very loud  the voice of a variety-stage veteran determined to peel paint off the cheap seats in the third balcony. (Tucker worried that her voice sounded like a foghorn on her cylinder records. She was right about the foghorn, but wrong to worry.) The emotional force of her full-throated style is on display in the original 1911 version of her signature number, “Some of These Days”  a moan of pleasure and pain.

Tucker’s vocals were a triumph of not just power but, in a raucous way, finesse. She slurs some vocal lines and punches out others hard against the beat. She attacks the chorus of “Please Don’t Take My Harem Away” like a deranged opera diva and delivers “My Husband’s in the City” in slyly syncopated speech, a kind of turn-of-the-century rapping. It’s a strikingly modern sound.

There is a larger lesson here for pop-music historians. Tucker, like other vaudeville comedians of her day, aimed hard for the funny bone, creating comic vocal effects and singing in a variety of exaggerated accents. (In addition to blackface turns, she performed Jewish dialect and country-bumpkin “rube” tunes.) It was shtick, but also a radical break with the musical past  a rejection of the Europhile light-opera aesthetics that had long predominated in American popular song, emphasizing purity of intonation, clear diction and squarely hit notes.

Historians and rock critics have long enshrined blues queens like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith (both are Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees) as clarion voices of musical modernity. “Origins of the Red Hot Mama” suggests that it may be time we looked to another group of women, Tucker and her vaudeville fellow travelers, who made American pop sound more American: looser, more vernacular, more swinging.

A case in point is “She Knows It,” a half-shouted, half-spoken rant in which Tucker boasts about her singing (“I’ve got a voice that’s as sweet as the robin’s tweet-tweet  and I know it”), her beauty (“My ruby lips are so red, they knock all the roses dead”), and her (fictional) amorous adventures with J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller and the Prince of Wales: “He said, ‘Sophie, be my sweetheart, you can have anything’/I said, ‘You come back and talk to me when you’re the king.’ ”

The song was recorded 87 years ago. But how different is it, really, from the hits that dominate radio today, in which haughty, charismatic divas issue demands and disses at top volume? Who could listen to “She Knows It” and doubt that a straight line can be drawn from Sophie to Beyoncé? Tucker was  distinctively, definitively  a red hot mama. But not, by a long shot, the last one.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 20, 2009An article on Aug. 30 about the singer Sophie Tucker misstated the process by which her family’s surname was changed from Kalish to Abuza. Tucker’s father, Zachary, gave the family name Abuza to United Statesimmigration officials upon his arrival in New York City in 1887. The family’s name was not changed at Ellis Island. (At that time Ellis was not yet the site of a federal immigration portal; it became one in 1890.)

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Arts »A version of this article appeared in print on August 30, 2009, on page AR1 of the New York edition.